Stalnaker on sleeping beauty

The Sleeping Beauty puzzle provides a nice illustration of the approach to self-locating belief defended by Robert Stalnaker in Our Knowledge of the Internal World (2008), as well as a test of the utility of that method. The setup of the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is by now fairly familiar. On Sunday Sleeping Beauty is told the rules of the game, and a (known to be) fair coin is flipped. On Monday, Sleeping Beauty is woken, and then put back to sleep. If, and only if, the coin landed tails, she is woken again on Tuesday after having her memory of the Monday awakening erased.

Note that I’m not assuming that Beauty’s memories are erased in other cases. This makes the particular version of the case I’m discussing a little different to the version popularised in Elga (2000). This shouldn’t make any difference to most analyses of the puzzle, but it helps to clarify some issues.

On Wednesday she is woken again and the game ends. There are a few questions we can ask about Beauty’s attitudes as th ...

Shin, H. S. (1989). Non-partitional information on dynamic state spaces and the possibility of speculation. Working Paper 90–11, Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Univesity of Michigan.